Howletts Visit (Part 1)

I've always loved looking at wild animals, and when I started getting into photography seriously would come away with quite a few photos. But I've never managed to take any quite as good as I hda on my last visit, and with being a charity member of the Aspinall Foundation, it meant that I would get a free pass every quarter. So I packed my bags with some lenses which would help see me through almost all situations (well, almost)

 

Above shows a Capybara laying in the sun, both taken with different lenses. The one on the left was taken with a 500mm Prime Mirror Lens. Great for long distances and fast shutter speeds (as I didn't want to lug a tripod around I used the fences for support) The one on the right was taken with a 100mm 2.8L IS USM Macro Canon Lens. You'll notice a huge different in terms of sharpness and detail. The Mirror Lens was designed for a film camera, the fact that it fits and locks on my camera was a bonus, but it does mean it has one fixed aperture, what ever that value is I'll never know as the camera displays it as a '0'. All I can say is you need a tripod or something to keep it steady, unless you have enough light to take photos at 1/500 of a second to avoid camera shake blur. The vignetting (slightly darker part around the outside of the photo) was added on as an effect. The one on the right is a modern top of the range optics lens which I had no problems taking photos with at all.

This one is of a Gava Gibbon with her baby (right). Great thing about seeing the monkeys is you get the usually placid mothers, and the very active playful babies (shown below whilst drop kicking some rope netting)

The Giant Anteater was in it's indoor part of the enclosure, so I basically stuck the lens (with it's hood on) right up against the glass to avoid getting any reflection, and as it was darker inside had to up the ISO to make sure I didn't get any blurry shots caused by low  shutter speeds on moving subjects.

Next were the Black & White Ruffed Lemurs, which I didn't know, had a huge open enclosure which the public were allowed to roam freely in. When you're out photographing animals and a chance to take photos without cages, bars or fences in your view finder, you can't but help go 'ohhh' and go straight in. To my right were a couple of Lemurs snoozing in the midday Sun (above photos) and slightly further in I managed to get some photos of one munching away on some apple. Very easy animal to photograph as they take an interest in the noise of the clicks and you pointing some long reflective thing at them, so I managed to get some lovely photos!

 

After I left, I caught a glimpse of the lone Lemur crashing out after my exhaustive visit (see below). Guess it's never done so much modelling work!

Opposite the Lemur enclosure were a couple of Bengal Tigers. While I was busy snapping away at the approach Male Tiger I didn't notice the female laying right near me! Was a quick snap taken just  at the right time as she had obviously grown bored of what I was doing and fell promptly back asleep and out of camera view!

 Part 2 to follow shortly....

(I'll be updating my website to include a gallery soon which will show more photos there and all of them will be available as prints - www.ljsdigitalphotography.com)

Rocking in the Dark

So I've now had the chance to test my camera out in a full lit room with moving children, and a gentleman who could out pose a rock. My next challenge was to take photographs of a rock band performing live at a venue. My last camera suffered from high noise (that's those speckled coloured dots that appear) and even at the high ISO range (the amount of light that is let through to the camera's exposure sensor) it still couldn;t handle fast shutter speeds. This meant if someone moved a fraction to fast, it left a blurred trail.

So here is a picture from my old Fuji FinePix bridge camera. This is one of the better photos, and with some simple editing the noise was reduced to give it a nice smooth look. But it does lack some definition in the subject. but this might have to do with me shooting it from 15 meters away! But, at least the stage was lit up like a chirstmas tree!

This next photo was taken at a completely different venue, it had nice dark moody lighting, great for moshing in the dark... terrible for taking photos and hoping to achieve anything usable... or so I thought. This was the first time I had used the RAW setting to get the best potential... this meant that when I edited the photo I could adjust the colour and luminosity before converting the file into a JPG. So by playing around with the light curve I was able to give the photo a comic art sort of look, which means that the JPG is unedited... get that through your brains! (With the exception of me adding a border this photo has not been manipulated since it was converted from the RAW file). Still unsure about RAW, open a new tab and google it! The above photo was also taken in B&W at the same time in JPG mode on the camera.

Again I had gone for the gritty comic book art look, it worked only on some of the photos, there still had to be the correct amount of light and a decent enough shot to make it work still. Because of the stage lights I ended up with 3 distinct colours come through.

Now, the above photo was already a JPG from the time the photo was taken by the camera. The great thing about B&W images is you can go further with the whole contrast and sharpness, it doesn't matter if you end up with a bit of noise, it makes it look more gritty! But here I've gone the other way, in my program Photoscape I have the option to add bloom effect, this is where the image is blurred slightly and the light is increased, making the whole image appear softer. I see so many times from photos of live performances of just the band memebers, so let's take some time to admire the beauty of the instruments they use too huh?

When it's dark, and moody, with lots of high contrast (whole fade of shades from white to black set against each other), then Sepia or Black & White is king. Colour tones work very differently in these settings as you;re move worried about getting the correct amount of light on the subject rather than the colour that you see (ie.. green skin would just look weird, but if you make the skin green in black and white of sepia instead, it actually helps make the skin tones look more subtle and soft).

Here we have the same chappy as in the top photo, now appart from the obvious colour differences, what else can you tell me that really stands out from this photo to the one far above? Try to bare in mind the first photo had enough lighting to see from out of space, where here it was full of colours that shone from the sides only.

Anyone interesting in hearing this band play can find IRIS's (In Retrospect I See) website here. They've commissioned me to do a proper photo shoot at some point so keep an eye out for that!

Fascination and Babies

The two normally go together for a lot of mothers, and even fathers, 'fascination and babies'. Absorbed by their own creation, a new release of life. For those that don't have children don't ever look at babies the same way. So when I was asked "Would you like to take some photos of my baby" I looked at it more from a photographer's point of view as "I just read some hints and tips articles about photographing kids, I'd love to apply that knowledge to good use", rather than "ohhh, a baby!!! how cute would that be!"

Well as it turns out, I found baby Nathans huge transfixed eyes and simple little smile quite cute, maybe I can see the fascination. It's the stories the mother tells you after your initial thought of that though that makes you go "yuck, maybe not"


To start off with, we had Nathan placed on a soft creamy coloured fleece. I was worried that the bright studio lights at 560 watts might blind him or cause him to cry, squint or give me evils. But as it turns out he was more interested in me the whole way through the shoot which made taking photos of him a doddle.







With the bright red football shirt on, I thought maybe it would be better to try with a black background, and maybe apply some tips and tricks I learnt about using sepia to make the picture stand out. As I found with young children and babies, they tend to suffer from heat rashes, red blotches and exzma around the face. So a lot of red colour alteration was required as time progressed as Nathan's face was ticking over like a red hot boiler in all his clothes.

I added some grain (noise) and went to town with the contrast settings with the photo on the left, I quite like it personally, but is as always the way, everyone has different perceptions of what they like.

 With the next two images you see I decided to use what I had learnt from taking photos of a band at a gig. How can the two possibly be related and how can that help? Well, it's the red lights from stage sets and how I round a way to edit out the red light whilst still retaining skin colour tones! It takes a lot of painstaking effort, The photo on the left here probably took me about an hour of careful touching up and alterations to get that healthy glowing look. The original photo would look quite flat in comparison, showing huge amounts of bright red skin along Nathans cheeks, top left of his forehead and on top of his shoulders. What I like about working with such a large photo, is you can zoom in at 100%, the photo is still in focus, crisp and sharp to the point you can see almost every skin pore. Otherwise when it comes to changing skin colours and contrast you'd be left with pixelated blobs of mess which you can only get rid of by smoothing the skin. But then you'd end up with a photo of a baby that looked like it had plastic for skin.

The last one captures Nathan's natural foot fetish. He was always grabbing it and pulling it up to his face, but it looked so natural and what you expect babies to do most of the time.

All in all I was happy with the end results, I learnt a lot about editing the skin tones from this little project and hopefully I can put that to good use next time I go round someone's house to photograph their ickle one.

Click here to visit my website about any of my portrait or wedding photography services.

A change of path

After getting a call out of the blue one evening, I was asked if I could take some photos of a DJ for his website, as he needed some professional looking photos to give to agents for advertising his corporate services. Now I had no idea what to do for corporate looking photos for a DJ, so I did the google search for other corporate DJs (the sort that do events for either parties, celebrations or whatever they're hired for) and was amazed how many top corporate DJs don't have a decent photo of themselves.

Most of the ones I found have a mobile phone upload of themselves in the blurry distance or taken with a disco light shining into the lense. So from the offstart I thought I had no trouble for comparison here.

I had a few ideas, but as the DJ needed some shots taken in a Tux and some in a shirt to look smart, the best idea I thought to begin with was a black background. I've seen this technique used normally on baby photographs as it eliminates any over garrish colour of the skin and gives the picture a more pleasing look.

All my shots were taken in .jpg format as I hadn't used my RAW editor software yet so felt more at ease editing the .jpg directly the one time over so as to not loose too much image detail. But as the photos are intended for 320x320 resolution max I guess there wasn;t much to worry about that.

The hardest part is thinking on how I wanted the DJ to look so as to look professional about his work and look friendly and inviting so as to not scare of any potential clients. Out of the 160 odd photos taken I scrutinised and narrowed down the field to just 42 photos that I was happy with...still giving the DJ plenty of different images to pick and choose to use. Some with mirth, some that looked like out of a James Bond movie and a couple that I was very happy with.

When I took the above photo I knew I wanted a close up to make it into a B&W photo. It meant getting very close to the DJ's face so had to make sure the studio lights were set at a wide angle so as to not get any drop shadow appear. Applied a few adjustment filters using photoshop and voila.

For this one I posterized the photo to using just 7 colours before I applied my B&W effects. And to give it more drama I upped the contrast and brightness and added a slight blue hint via a digitally applied blue camera filter. Maybe a bit much for a corporate DJ, I don;t know. I kinda got my idea from Goldie who played a villain in one of the James Bond movies.

My final image of this blog is one with less editing, simply had some minor sharpness added to it, slight contrast enhancement and sepia effect added. The angle makes it look different from the standard straight on poses I took and it stood out more for me, with the DJ in his Tux and with accessorised bow tie and ear phones, it made the complete picture. Though he could always use it for going into a live sports commentator career.

For more information on DJ Lucci you can view his website www.djlucci.com

A Great Start

Ok... I haven't been up to much photography lately, but I've been working hard. I've made my first wedding booking of the year now (6th August), booked in a band for a photography session at various locations and going to help build them a website to front them, and got past this issue where mobile phone users who like to browse the web can't access flash based websites (like mine). So I've created two websites using a service call Winksite.

http://winksite.mobi/ljsdigiphoto/weddings

http://winksite.mobi/ljsdigiphoto/portraits


The links are self explanatory about what sort of information is on them. I've also managed to get 2 new designs for some flyers and even a 3 page brochure for our wedding services. Now to just wait for them to arrive and hope I can get places to stock them to give out!

I'm hoping to get a couple of baby photo sessions booked in the next few weeks so keep an eye for them also. Otherwise, I think I'm going to go for a nice long walk with my camera and see what I can find!

Jamie & Isaac's Photo Shoot (23rd Jan 2011)

So I had the one shoot done with no problems whatsoever, ready for day two. In no way did yesterday's photo shoot prepare me for this one.

For the above photo I selected the background area and added some zoom blur, it seems to help bring the attention to the centre where it looks like it's being pinched at, I especially like the expression on Jamie's face on this one, it's a great beaming smile and it shows that he's such a happy chappy.

His brother is a very energetic play machine. This meant trying to capture him in the shots required a) Patience and b) Relying on his parents abilities to distract him with an onset of toys. Some of these meant I was able to take quite a few photos of him being still or prone. I Guess he just looked at this whole session as one big play time! So did I really!

The other added bonus was location, in a conservatory with glass all around so plenty of ambient light, but as it was overcast I still needed to make good use of my lights in the small space, sometimes it meant standing in the ball pit.

Now I'm not very used to children still, as never normally being around them, but being a big kid myself probably helped. I think with it doing this photo shoot at hime with all their toys around them meant the children weren't shy at all and it meant I could try and capture their personalities in the shots if I was quick enough. If that's doesn't work, get the parents to join in so they can hold onto them :)

I changed the set around constantly, using cushions, not using cushions, at an angle, with toys, in a tunnel or playing in the ball pit and it meant I had to make sure the lighting levels were correct with each set up. Because of this I actually took extra time (the session lasted nearly 2 1/2 hours I think), but I did enjoy the challenges this presented to me and the different scenes to create. The ball pit leant itself to make a great border from birds eye shots whilst the kids both wiggled around in the ball pit.

They also had a cool little tunnel, now I've always loved tunnels, but alas, I was too big to get in it without looking like a numpty. But I managed to get some great photos of Isaac playing with a rather large Buzz Lightyear in there, and with it's thin polyester material, it meant it diffused the light further creating a nice illuminative glow.

The whole experience had been a deep learning curve for positioning and props...as well as how to distract a child long enough to look complacent with being sat in front of two big glaring spot lights and a weird man going "ohhh... that's a nice one". I'll also need to practise more with using the lights on people with glasses too as I found I was getting a lot of reflective glare which spoilt a lot of the photos. I was pleased with the end result on the whole, as I managed to get a decent number of decent photos, but a lot of these will require further editing to remove unwanted back ground scenery. Another learning curve for me has been using Photoshop Elements, and I wouldn't have been able to have done this without it's decent cloning tools and selection tools. I'll be a pro in no time!

A big thanks goes to the parents for their co-operation and five stars to the two boys for putting up with me blinding them.

My next project is a Rock Band called IRIS, shooting in some outdoor locations and getting some studio shots for their website. 'til then, rock on :-)

First Photo Shoot (Sat 22nd)

Looks like I got my lights and backdrops just in time, not only did I have my first photo shoot on Saturday but also my first experience with directing a child. Luckily, this child was very well behaved and I prayed they would all be like that. But alas, that would not be the case. The shot below was taken with a white canvas cloth as a backdrop and two diffused lights at slightly varying heights but at roughly 45 degrees from point of focus.

I managed to get some photos of Jack and his father together, at one point even their lovely fat dog called Honey made it onto the scene momentarily after some birbery with a doggie treat (which was then soon spat out and forgotten about)

The beauty of digital cameras is that you can just keep shooting and shooting. This was a one hour session and I managed to accumulate just over 600 images. I did this in mind knowing that the majority would not be usable plus it gave me more chance to get that exact pose or facial expression that would make the picture, in a word, perfect. To help with the white background I had to set the cameras exposure compensation up a couple of stops as it was making the image too dark. This also helps to be able to up the shutter speed a fraction and not loose out too much in the way of light for stopping motion blur.

There came a natural end to this photo shoot, it wasn't timed so there was no rush, but Jack was starting to get slightly bored (primarily because his laptop's battery died) and the lights being on him for so long were making him strain his eyes all the time, but he did really well and I managed to get some fantastic shots which required very little in the way of editing. The only editing that needed doing on some of the white scenes were to crop or clone over the bits I didn't want. (Like my assistant holding the backdrop because the dog likes walking past it quite a bit). I just have to remember that props are fantastic for kids as they divert all their attention away and can make some different scenes for shots.

Sunday's photo shoot was a different story, not as peaceful or sedate! I'll let you know how that one went in a few days, right now I'm still editing the pictures :-)